Having popped his rom com cherry at the age of 62 in Hampstead, Brendan Gleeson has been filling us in on his next project, a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s detective novel Mr Mercedes.
King’s 2014 book boasts some uncomfortable parallels with recent real-life tragedies — his disturbed antagonist Brady Harsfield (played in the series by Harry Treadaway) carries out a mass killing by driving a vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians, and plots another that will take place at a pop concert.
“When Stephen King wrote it, it was pre-Nice and pre-all that,” Brendan explains. “It’s a tough one because I’m not mad into gore porn or any of that stuff. I think what we’re trying to do is take this stuff which is now a reality and look at the consequences of it.”
“It’s a bit like Calvary,” he adds. “It’s a bit of an ordeal. You’re getting psychologically messed around. It’s not a nice place to be. But I’m happy with what I’ve seen of it anyway. And it’s a little bit different to Hampstead!”
The legendary Dublin actor gets cosy with Diane Keaton in Joel Hopkins' new screwball comedy Hampstead, and his character — a loveable grump named Donald — is a million miles away from the hardened criminals and authority figures we’re used to seeing him play.
Although dismissive of romantic comedies in the past, Brendan admits that creating loved-up chemistry on screen is harder than it looks. “Diane is brilliant,” he says. “But we have very different ways of working. She was nervous and I was nervous. She would say, ‘Oh I’m not a real actor,’ and I’m like ‘What?.. oh yeah, the Godfather was brutal!’ But she has all this high energy and she’s really, really bright. It became really enjoyable because I had to reshuffle the way I thought about doing stuff. I have my own kind of anal preparation where I’m trying to put a control on everything. And I had to lose that.”
He was also worried about convincing the audience that he could charm a woman like Diane. “Shorthand is not necessarily a bad thing in a film. You get a beautiful person and everyone goes, ‘Colin Farrell, grand, of course you’d go for that!’ Whereas when you’re over 50, the audience is thinking, ‘Why would I be in love with that?!’ It becomes a little more complicated,” he says.
Hampstead is a rom com with a twist — Brendan’s character Donald is a squatter living in a shack on London’s Hampstead Heath, while Diane’s Emily is an American widow living in one of the pristine mansions overlooking his plot, secretly broke thanks to her deceased husband’s debts.
“I was hoping that we didn’t patronise the homeless as part of a folly for the rich people,” Brendan explains. “I was hoping that there was enough reality in Donald’s story and in her case of fallen glory too, that it doesn’t become an abusive schmaltzy thing, selling falsehood as reality.”
Brendan’s character is partly inspired by a real-life Irishman who lived in a campsite on the Heath for 12 years, and was successfully awarded the deed to his half-acre piece of land, which is now worth almost €4 million. “I contacted him but he didn’t want to talk to me,” Brendan says of Harry Hallowes, who passed away last February. “Then he died and that was the end of that.”
Still, Brendan was fascinated by the real-life hermit. “He was a really interesting character, I would have loved to have explored his story. He was from Sligo, a Loyalist type. He said he would have left the plot to the Queen of England in his will because she was the only one left with any integrity. And he was deadly serious about that!”